The State of the Jews

My upcoming Australian Jewish News column:

In defense of Judge Goldstone, sort of

By Haviv Rettig Gur

Judge Richard Goldstone, the namesake of the report that convinced much of the world that Israel had indeed committed war crimes in Gaza, is getting a bad rap.

Not about the Goldstone Report, to be sure. That document, when you actually take the trouble to read it, is a collection of hearsay about Israeli brutality that fails to challenge the Palestinian witnesses but somehow still manages to conclude, unequivocally, that Israel violated the most sacred laws of human morality.

But, you know, that was last year. Water under the bridge.

Now, Judge Goldstone is facing a barrage of criticism in the Jewish world for his role as an enforcer of the law under the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Some details of his apartheid-era judicial rulings came to light last week in an expose published by Israel’s largest daily, Yediot Ahronot. The article blasted Goldstone for sentencing 28 blacks to death and enforcing – allegedly happily – the country’s racist laws, including jailing two young black men for possessing a video tape of a speech by an associate of Nelson Mandela and acquitting four police officers who had harassed a white woman believed to be sleeping with a non-white man.

For his part, Goldstone noted that he only sentenced two men to death, each time for a brutal murder, as was mandatory by South African law at the time, while the remaining 26 were failed appeals during his tenure on the Transvaal supreme court.

Reactions to the news came fast and furious. Jeffrey Goldberg commented that “this new report suggests not only that Goldstone is at best intermittently principled, but that he knew his old hanging-judge record would one day catch up with him.”

Alan Dershowitz declared that Goldstone’s defense that his death penalty convictions were in keeping with the law was not unlike that of the sadistic Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele.

Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, continued the Holocaust theme by calling Goldstone’s response “sadly reminiscent of the long discredited so-called ‘Nuremberg defense’ – ‘l was only obeying orders.’”

On the facts, Goldstone probably has a stronger case than his detractors. His acquittal of the policemen, for example, was explicitly made because of errors in the legal proceedings against them. And even at his most egregious Goldstone’s death sentences are not different from the norm of some of the world’s strongest democracies even today. Japan, for instance, or the United States.

As South Africa’s former chief justice Arthur Chaskalson told me last week, Goldstone “was regarded by everyone who knew him as a liberal judge.”

It was Goldstone, Chaskalson noted, who in the 1980s declawed the infamous Group Areas Act by giving the courts discretion over the forced evictions of people living in the wrong racial districts.

So which is it? Is Goldstone the guilt-ridden former enforcer of legislated racism or a hero who once held the line against the worst offenses of a bad regime?

My answer: neither. He’s something much simpler. He’s a joiner.

Once, at the start of his career, Goldstone had to choose how he would behave in an immoral system. He chose to join it, and then by most accounts worked to correct it from within.

At the end of his career, he had to make that choice again. Once again, he chose to join. This time it was the UN Human Rights Council, which since its inception four years ago has devoted 82% of its censures to Israel alone and this year went to the trouble of praising Sri Lanka for defeating the Tamil Tigers in a war that cost 20,000 civilian lives.

In order for law to be the impartial arbiter of disputes, it needs certain fundamental institutions: the unbiased judge, an independent judiciary, a clear hierarchy of appeal, an elected legislature that assures that law emanates from the society to which it is being applied.

But the UN has none of these, because it is not in any sense a legal body. It is a political one that operates by mob rule.

Yet the effect of Goldstone’s report has been to attach the prestige of “law” to a non-legal public lashing of Israel commissioned by and for a political body already irredeemably prejudiced against Israel.

Goldstone himself insists that his report is not admissible as evidence in a court of law. It was merely “fact-finding,” he says. But who cares about the legal niceties when Goldstone himself seems to violate them in his report’s spectacularly adamant conclusions about Israel’s heinous violations of human rights law?

And so the question remains. Is he naïve? Or, as with apartheid, is he happily wielding a racist stick in the service of a higher cause?

Or maybe he’s still, as in his youth, simply a joiner.

It’s no secret Ha’aretz represents the left-wing fringe in Israeli politics, with columnists who openly question Jewish statehood and a reflexive assumption of Israeli responsibility for anything that goes wrong in the region.

Still, even for Ha’aretz, this is crazy. In an editorial titled: “Netanyahu, the US has given you a second chance. Use it.” the paper tries to argue that (a) the Americans are offering a “second chance” that, presumably, may not return, (b) “the US had demanded that Netanyahu … agree to deliberations on all the core issues,” and (c) that “Netanyahu will commit a grave error if he is tempted to continue the damaging clash with Obama, and if he uses the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to enlist the president’s political enemies to advance the positions of the Israeli right wing.”

The degree of disinformation contained in this piece is staggering, and begs the question: Are Ha’aretz’s savvy editors so disconnected from reality, or are they knowingly lying to advance their politics?

This is worth following. Could an affluent, Western Palestinian Diaspora be part of the solution?

Here’s an attempt to create some kind of ‘Palestinian Agency’:

The state of Palestine does not exist; the courts are still not working, local government has numerous problems, not to mention health care, education and infrastructure. Representatives of Palestinian communities abroad have come to Bethlehem to kick off the independent “Palestine Network.”

“Welcome to your second home,” announces Ramzi Khoury, executive director of the Palestine Network. “You are representatives from 23 countries who have chosen to be engaged in building this Palestinian state and not just talking about it. This is a do tank, rather than a talk tank. This is not a political club.”

…

“If you want to build a democratic state, you need to tackle all the sectors of that state,” Khoury says. “So doctors need to come down here and revamp our health system, engineers need to come here and help us build, lawyers and judges need to come and help us create an independent judiciary and a state of law, and we need educators.”

The Palestine Network is not just another charity or source of funding. The Palestinians have many economic backers. In 2008, global financial aid to the Palestinian Authority exceeded $2 billion, including about $526 million from Arab countries, $651m. from the European Union, $300m. from the US and about $238m. from the World Bank, according to the Arab League’s 2009 economic report.

The founding conference, sponsored by the governments of Germany and Belgium, was held in the opulent Convention Center on the outskirts of Bethlehem, hub of Palestinian culture and tourism.

The network’s goal is to use expertise from Palestine’s diaspora communities to develop the local economy, judiciary, education and health infrastructures in what will be the future state.

Why do the Palestinian Baruch Goldsteins rule the Palestinian public square? What possible conclusions are we supposed to draw from the decision to name a Ramallah square after Dalal Mughrabi, “who led the worst terror attack in Israel’s history when she and other terrorists hijacked a bus and murdered 37 civilians in 1978″?

And why is Ramallah doing it on the anniversary of the attack?! I know this blog has a handful of readers in Arab lands. Anyone care to explain?

From Palestinian Media Watch:

Not only does [the Ramallah municipality] still intend to name the square after the terrorist, but the date chosen for the inaugural ceremony is this Thursday, March 11, the 32nd anniversary of the terror attack.

…

Headline: “Preparations for inauguration of Shahida (Martyr) Dalal Mughrabi Square complete”
“The El-Bireh Municipality has completed construction work at the Shahida (Martyr) Dalal Mughrabi Square in the Um Al-Sharait region, and has commenced preparations for its inauguration this Thursday, the anniversary of Mughrabi’s Martyrdom. The mayor, Jamal Al-Tawil, said that… this year the municipality will celebrate the inauguration of the Shahida (Martyr) Dalal Mughrabi Square in order to commemorate her memory and her sacrifice as a Palestinian woman who resisted the occupation. City Council member Aida Abu-Ubeid said that the square is considered a symbol of the sacrifice of the Palestinian woman. She also noted that flowers and trees will be planted there, and that a picture of the Shahida Dalal Mughrabi will be placed at the center of the square.”
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, March 7, 2010]

There has been no public comment from the Obama administration about the PA’s honoring of the terrorist.

Henry Siegman, former head of the American Jewish Congress, continues his effort to punish and pressure Israel into more concessions toward the Palestinians. Writing in The Nation, he warns:

Israel’s relentless drive to establish “facts on the ground” in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in violation of even the limited settlement freeze to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed himself, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that “achievement,” one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from “the only democracy in the Middle East” to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.

Don’t believe it. Siegman’s vision suffers from a disparity between the real Israel and the Israel he believes he knows.

For example, he argues that “it is now widely recognized in most Israeli circles–although denied by Israel’s government–that the settlements have become so widespread and so deeply implanted in the West Bank as to rule out the possibility of their removal (except for a few isolated and sparsely populated ones) by this or any future Israeli government unless compelled to do so by international intervention, an eventuality until now considered entirely unlikely.”

Really? When over 80% of settlers live on 5% of the West Bank, most of it adjacent to the Green Line, when the popular reaction to the Disengagement from Gaza was an overwhelming yawn – no Galilee bed-and-breakfast and no Tel Aviv beach was empty during those two ostensibly traumatic weeks in August 2005.

The settlements can be removed, and the vast centrist Israeli mainstream that has so far escaped the notice of an ignorant world media will implement this removal. But only when it knows that the Palestinians won’t use the withdrawal from the West Bank the way they used the one from Gaza.

In short, Siegman is not a serious observer of Israel.

In 2008, he wrote another piece in the Nation seeking to prove Israel’s dishonesty in peacemaking. His sole proof: the settlements. Always the settlements.

It would be one thing if Israeli governments had insisted on delaying a Palestinian state until certain security concerns had been dealt with. But no government serious about a two-state solution to the conflict would have pursued, without letup, the theft and fragmentation of Palestinian lands, which even a child understands makes Palestinian statehood impossible.

I’m a big fan of American Jews taking Israel to the cleaners. I am genuinely mystified at their failure to protest the corrupt Israeli rabbinate’s efforts to define who is Jewish, or the complete absence of education about the Diaspora in all 12 years of an Israeli’s schooling, or the lack of Israeli support for Diaspora education while Israel joyfully drinks up American Jewish love and money with barely an acknowledging nod.

But the criticism on the peace process is not serious, and is repeatedly disproven by events. To insist on punishing Israel at this stage, Siegman must ignore the simple glaring fact that the Palestinians are refusing to prove the Israelis’ intransigence through, um, negotiating.

Yes, there are settlements. And yes, the settlement movement is a serious constituency with a resonant narrative. So it would be excruciatingly difficult for Netanyahu to take on the entire far-right unless he can show the mainstream that there is a reason to do so.

But it is also true that the settlers have lost every time they were challenged – in Sinai, Gaza and the current extra-Jerusalemite freeze. The broader culture war within Israel over the past two decades has left them marginalized politically. It is only Palestinian brutality that has left the majority of the settlements intact.

To seriously suggest further punishment of Israel without giving even casual consideration to the simple fact that the Palestinians have yet to concede anything in 17 years of negotiations – not even simple rhetorical gestures such as recognition of the Jews’ right to self-determination – is either stupid or willfully disingenuous.

You don’t trust Netanyahu? Fine. But right now, it isn’t Netanyahu that has to prove his good faith and capacity for peacemaking.

Pressure Israel all you want. As Obama has discovered in recent months, the Palestinians will only up their demands and push off the inevitable compromise.

A wonderful discovery, Dr. Emmanuel Navon of Tel Aviv University and his blog For the Sake of Zion.

He expresses beautifully the consensus feeling among most Israelis. Shlomo Sand may be sexy in a certain foreign milieu, but he is so radically disconnected from the Israeli discourse and Israeli identity that no one even bothers to challenge him here. The Jewishness of the Israeli state is so obvious, and ethnic Jewish identification so universal that Sand is little more than a circus curiosity in this country. Only abroad, among those profoundly ignorant and exceedingly loud about Israel, can he find his groupies.

Navon’s latest captures the hypocrisy of the likes of Tony Judt and Sand, and should be read by, well, Judt and Sand. Unfortunately, their academic credentials don’t seem to drive them to self-critical reflection.

One wonders what happens when Navon and Sand pass each other in the hallways of Tel Aviv University.

Anyway, here’s Navon:

The understandable frustration with the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has led some people to suggest that, for the conflict to abate, one of the two protagonists must give up. But what if both sides prove relentless forever? A Freudian answer to that question has recently been devised by (you guessed it) Jews: explain to the Jews (but not to the Palestinians, Heaven forbid), that they don’t actually exist, and they will stop fighting for their “imagined self.”

It is logically undisputable that there would be no Israeli-Palestinian conflict if there were no Israelis or no Palestinians (or both); that there would be no anti-Semitism if Jews didn’t exist (though even that is debatable); and that there would be no car accidents if cars hadn’t been invented….

This is the underlying argument that Shlomo Sand is promoting in his book The Invention of the Jewish People. A historian of modern French and European history at Tel-Aviv University, Sand is no expert in the Ancient Middle East and in Jewish history. His book has been dismissed and ridiculed by scholars of Jewish history as a cheap and embarrassing piece of falsifications and propaganda. Even Tony Judt (also an expert on modern European history, and also an anti-Zionist Jew), had to admit that Sand’s contribution to the knowledge of Jewish history “is at best redundant” (”Israel must unpick its ethnic myth,” Financial Times, 7 December 2009). Judt does not dispute that Sand’s book is academically sloppy, but he argues that this sloppiness is irrelevant (if not forgivable): What counts, according to Judt, is the point that Sand is trying to make.

For Judt, “the perverse insistence upon identifying a universal Jewishness with one small piece of territory … is the single most important factor accounting for the failure to solve the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio.” In other words, one of the central tenets of Judaism is “perverse” and is “the single most important” reason for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So Jews must abandon one of their strongest beliefs –a belief that gave them hope and helped them survive throughout two millennia of exile. On the other hand, the fact that Islam holds that a land that was once ruled by Muslims must be “liberated” from “infidels” is not a problem. Nor is the fact that the Palestinians insist on invading Israel with millions of descendants (or alleged descendants) of the 1948 refugees, or that they deny the very existence of the Jerusalem Temple. The problem is not Muslim theology or Palestinian myths. The problem is Jewish faith.